If you're really looking forward to GTA V, Sleeping Dogs is especially worth playing over the holidays. It's a very violent, very polished, very enjoyable open-world crime game whose central kung-fu crime movie story is, for once, as interesting as all the optional chaos you can take part in. It's quite directed for an open-world game, but it's also very slick and consistent, with very little superfluous fluff. And it's got lots of achingly cool costumes, which is always a plus.

Velocity is a combination of puzzler and vertical shooter, out on the PlayStation Store - it's a Mini, so it's only £4. It's a wonderful homage to retro score-attack shooters, but one that's bursting with original ideas as well. It appropriates the aesthetic and cheerful, futuristic chiptune of the past and grafts it onto sprawling, inventive levels that are more reminiscent of Metroid than Ikaruga. It's especially well-suited to Vita, but can be played on PSP and PS3 too.

Terry Cavanagh's brain-melting twitch-puzzler is gaming at its most elemental. Rotating a tiny triangle around a central point as flashing, deadly patterns come rushing towards the centre of the screen, you become one with your primal gaming nature, responding with nano-second precision to incoming hazards. Awesome music pulls you further into the zone. Last more than five seconds on your first try and you're quite possibly a prodigy. It's $3 on the App Store. I'm still waiting on an Android version.

Re-released on Wii this year, bizarrely, Project Zero 2 (or Fatal Frame in America) is "an enduring classic that every horror fan should have in their collection", according to our reviewer. Wii controls enhance rather than ruin the experience, and the lack of progress and innovation in the horror genre becomes disappointingly apparent as you play through and realise that nobody's really done anything as ambitious as this in the nine years since it came out on PS2.

We've had two great stealth games this year: Dishonored, which is really only a stealth game if you're enormously restrained, and Mark of the Ninja, which is what Shinobi would be if it were 2D and made by the guys who did Shank. Its art and animation draw you in, but you stay for the hardcore stealth.

I think we can safely say now that this was the Wii's last great game. It's not the JRPG revolution that Xenoblade Chronicles was, but it's a heartfelt story that moves along at a compelling pace, and the combat system is a great innovation. Great characterisation and localisation work together with Nobuo Uematsu's musical score to elevate the presentation, too.